> Actually Bitcoin is down 13.52% in the last 7 days
If a stock market index (e.g., S&P 500, FTSE 100, etc) was doing the same there would be many more headlines and people freaking out.
Some people claim that Bitcoin is "money", or at least a store of value, but I'm not sure I'd want to have any net worth stored in something that is as volatile at Bitcoin has been over the past year:
The S&P 500 market cap is over $40 trillion. The bitcoin market cap is under $2 trillion. I just looked up this data super quick with Google so corrections are welcome. And yep, I'm editing my comment because apparently that data is for all of crypto - bitcoin is $815 billion according to ycharts.
That's still an absurd amount of money, but there is more than an order of magnitude difference just in money, not to mention how almost no parts of the modern economy interact with cryptocurrencies in any way whatsoever.
I don't necessarily agree with it, but market cap is essentially the standard metric for how we measure value in our economy. If Apple goes down 10% people care because they're worth trillions and lots of people lose money. If a mid-size company goes down 10% a lot fewer people care.
I understand what market cap is but I don’t understand why it is relevant to your point. Apple is the same order of magnitude as bitcoin but you claim the media would care about a 10% move in the former but not the latter.
Firstly it doesn’t make sense to me because bitcoin isn’t a company, nor is it made of them so this doesn’t feel like a like-for-like comparison. Secondly it doesn’t make sense to me because I don’t understand why market cap should be related to media reactions to volatility.
I don’t see what cohesive theory underlies your claim that a big ‘market cap’ is required for the media to care about volatility.
I was saying Apple is the S&P 500 and Bitcoin is a random midsize company - it was an analogy. No analogy is perfect though, and you can certainly poke holes in mine (as you have).
> Secondly it doesn’t make sense to me because I don’t understand why market cap should be related to media reactions to volatility.
Because larger amounts of money matter more than smaller amounts of money. That's all. Penny stocks can fluctuate 1000x in a day but nobody cares.
Bigger market caps means bigger market makers with far more liquidity, so an average trade is much smaller in the grand scheme of things. When there isn't as much liquidity and smaller volumes, the market will move more quickly.
You can't take one snapshot in time and compare it when the two assets exhibit wildly different volatility characteristics. You are capturing Bitcoin's price when it is down.
If we were to do the same thing at the end of the year last year we could say it went up 70% in 2021 (and that was after a big drop from it's ATH) whereas the S&P only went up 26%. See how that isn't the whole story?
> You can't take one snapshot in time and compare it when the two assets exhibit wildly different volatility characteristics.
I mean, you certainly can if you're taking the "buy and hold" approach, or hodl amongst the cool kids. It simply points out that buy and hold crypto is not guaranteed to be better than something like SPY, and the excess volatility is maybe not a good thing?
The highest possible returns != what investors actually achieve.
Pointing out that at the peak it was up higher than SPY, even though it is no longer up higher, and considering that a good thing seems very odd. It would also only relevant if you're able to know when things are at a top and bottom. Did you sell any bitcoin you owned when up 70% and, if so, have we reached a bottom when it is optimal to buy back in?
> Did you sell any bitcoin you owned when up 70% and, if so, have we reached a bottom when it is optimal to buy back in?
This is the ultimate investing question. What signals a top or a bottom? How do I sell just before the price falls and buy just before it climbs back up? Is there even an answer? There must be since there are literal trading bots out there making millions.
>It simply points out that buy and hold crypto is not guaranteed to be better than something like SPY
There are no guarantees in life, much less in financial markets of any kind. The whole concept of markets is that different investors make different assessments of different assets.
Bitcoin is 41 times higher in the same time period
Nasdaq is down 6% in a week
Bitcoin is up 4% in the last year, it was 40,254 on the 9th Jan 2020, and currently 41,766. Its lowest point in Dec 2019 was 6,540.05. Dec 2020 was 17,619.53. Dec 2021 was 42,874.62.
None of that really tells you anything about the relative worth or the direction.
I suppose short memory is good when remembering is painful.
I remember when ETH was about $100. BNB was $40 months before I had enough spare money to enter this market. I have one family member who once held several bitcoins but sold them at $70.
I went up x,xxx% from basically nothing though. Going up the same percentage in the next five years from the current price is another story. I wonder if this might be contributing to the popularity of NFTs as a new, alternative thing for people to risk their money on.
You may be confusing the bitcoin network conditions with price action.
iirc, there were some mainstream and social media stories of the recent "events" concerning the country of Kazakhstan regarding banning of bitcoin mining and the political unrest (and or violence that ensued). The blip you experienced may have been a direct result from this.
If a stock market index (e.g., S&P 500, FTSE 100, etc) was doing the same there would be many more headlines and people freaking out.
Some people claim that Bitcoin is "money", or at least a store of value, but I'm not sure I'd want to have any net worth stored in something that is as volatile at Bitcoin has been over the past year:
* https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/